This paper describes our system for the SemEval-2018 Task 12: Argument Reasoning Comprehension Task. We utilize skip-thought vectors, sentence-level distributional vectors inspired by the popular word embeddings and the skip-gram model. We encode preprocessed sentences from the dataset into vectors, then perform a binary supervised classification of the warrant that justifies the use of the reason as support for the claim. We explore a few variations of the model, reaching 54.1% accuracy on the test set, which placed us 16th out of 22 teams participating in the task.

Claims are the building blocks of arguments and the reasons underpinning opinions, thus analyzing claims is important for both argumentation mining and opinion mining. We propose a framework for representing claims as microstructures, which express the beliefs, judgments, and policies about the relations between domain-specific concepts. In a proof-of-concept study, we manually build microstructures for over 800 claims extracted from an online debate. We test the so-obtained microstructures on the task of claim stance classification, achieving considerable improvements over text-based baselines.